Kevin Myers

This is a harrowing-gripping read. A very personal chronicle of “The Troubles” by a young Leicester born journalist arriving in Belfast at the beginning of the 1970’s to report for RTE in Dublin. At the same time I began a three-year working relationship with Ulster that saw me flying in and out of the Province once or twice a month. Overall, I spent about a third of my working life in the Six Counties with occasional forays across the border to Dublin. These were terrible years for Northern Ireland; violent sectarian death became an everyday event, a bombing campaign began that reduced the city centre to ghost-town status at sunset. Nationalist areas of Belfast and Derry created their own “no-go areas” patrolled by armed terrorists who enjoyed de-facto recognition from the security forces, who did much in ignorance or by renegade purpose to kindle strife. This was as close as I have been to a war-zone and on numerous occasions my angels preserved me from harms-way, not least on that awful “Bloody Friday” in July 1971 when in the heart of Belfast as the Provos detonated a score or so bombs claiming nine lives with another 130 severely mutilated victims. Everyone who could ran for wherever they thought safety might be. An old woman stumbled in front of me; I helped her up as she called on God to drop a nuclear bomb “on us all and end it forever”. No such luck. Ulster’s agony was to be a generational torment of barbarity, culpability and numbing grief. Kevin Myers tells his story from the viewpoint of someone embedded in the geography and relationships of the conflict, (sometimes literally so, his frankness about his sexual exploits makes for weird juxtapositions). His dangerous lifestyle embraced most sides of the political and religious divides and his is a compelling account of the inevitability of a drift to savagery. For him it culminated in the burning alive of 12 Protestants taking part in a dog-breeders show in The La Mon House Hotel in 1978. By this time his demons were gaining the upper hand, it was past time to quit and horror tipped the scale. There is little of comfort less of redemption but Kevin Myers’s account is a searing illustration that the very worst evils lay close to the surface of our lives. Thus it is a call to vigilance though such lessons seem to require a constant re-learning.
The author readily acknowledges the debt he owes to David McKittrick (and others) for that unsurpassed work of scholarship: “Lost Lives” a cool factual account of each and every one of 3,697 deaths attributable to The Troubles, a number that has continued to creep upwards, mercifully at a much attenuated rate. I purchased Lost Lives four years ago, and have until now largely ignored it, a massive work of reference running to almost 1700 pages its destined to be (deservedly), the principal biographical source for those who died. Even disregarding the sheer size of the book no one could read it through, its just too lachrymose to take in more than a few pages at a time. Brief commentary from victims relatives, combined with a totally non-judgmental account of events makes it poignant to a point beyond despair. From the toddlers to the pensioners who lost their lives, the innocents and their murderers, often soon victims themselves, the police UDR and army men and women killed in the line of duty, McKtterick’s record, records it all and in the stillness of distanced contemplation makes the most damning case against all violence. Lost Lives provides architecture for Kevin Myer’s book (sub-title “Cheating Death in 1970’s Belfast), though their purposes differ. Have McKittrick with you as you read Myers, I found it valuable, for in their different ways they add enormously
to each other.… (més)

I was in Belfast and Derry last year on holiday, and while I was there read Kevin Myers' fairly recent memoir of reporting the Troubles in the north of Ireland 35 years ago, first for RTE and later as a freelance. You realise, some way in, that you are watching a man coming to terms with post-traumatic stress. He never says it, of course, and my saying it here is not intended to diminish a well-written and compelling book. But about half way through Watching the Door, he admits us to a dream he had, every night for several years, even after he has left the city.

Read the rest of the review here: http://aroundtheedges.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/watching-the-door/… (més)